AIIM

Translating Experience to the CIP

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When I took the Certified Information Professional (CIP) exam back in January, I didn’t study due to a bet. This made the process more challenging than necessary. What I wanted to do today was see if you could guess which area I scored the lowest.

I’m not leaving you without any information. You can always look at what I’ve been blogging about for clues. There is also my LinkedIn profile which will tell you what I’ve done over my career. Finally, checking out what each domain area in the CIP exam covers should help you match that all together.

This of course, begs the question, what do you get for guessing correctly? That is a tough one. The poll is anonymous, so it will be hard to reward individuals…so let’s crowdsource. I’ll take suggestions for all readers (making me publicly confess some dark secret of some sort) and for those readers that share their correct guess in the comments prior to my announcing results.

I’ll run this poll for one week. At the end I’ll share the correct answer, the area that I knew the best, and what areas I missed a question. This should help people determine what areas they may be lacking knowledge in as a supplement to the Sample Exam.

What Being a Certified Information Professional Says

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Certifiied Information Professional (CIP) logoIt’s been almost six months since I took and passed the CIP exam, becoming a Certified Information Professional. At that time I said I thought it was a valid measure of someone’s worth as an Information Professional. Since then, everyone I’ve talked to that has taken the exam has concurred.

If it is a valid measure, then those who have become a CIP are the kind of person you want in a senior role on any Information-centric project. Right? Is that a true statement?

What about a Big Data project?

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What You Need to Know about Cloud-base Content Management, AIIM 2012 Style

A couple months ago, I spoke at the AIIM 2012 Conference on the topic Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Cloud-Based Content Management (But Were Afraid to Ask). It was fun and I’ve been meaning to share the presentation with everyone but there have been two issues:

  1. The presentation is image heavy and even with notes, SlideShare doesn’t really help convey the content.
  2. The video was under wraps because it was under consideration for the free Best of AIIM 2012 virtual event in June.

Lucky for you, my session was deemed not one of the very best and I can share it with you now. I’d be upset if the quality of sessions at the AIIM Conference this hadn’t been so high. Billy Cripe gave a great presentation on Two Types of Collaboration and Ten Requirements for Using Them and that didn’t make the cut, but you can see that online now.

So, complete with the Q&A session, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Cloud-Based Content Management:

If you take anything away from the presentation, remember this:

  • The cloud is big and evolving. If your solution isn’t available today, it may be tomorrow.
  • You face the same issues if you stay at home as you would if you move to the cloud.
  • Creating new Information Islands is the new big trap. Avoid them.

Watch the presentation to learn more details on those takeaways, cloud terminology, and why Darth Vader is in the default image.  I’m also speaking on Moving Content Management to the Cloud: A Practical Perspective at info360 if you are planning to be there in June.

Please feel free to ask questions or add your thoughts in the comments below.

It’s 2012 and We Are Still Working on Process

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There are two great frustrations in my overall career. The first is that there is more unmanaged content now than there was when I started. The growth of Content Management just isn’t keeping pace with the growth of Content.

The second is the fact that we are still trying to automate the same types of processes now as we were when I first started in this industry in the 90s. My first project was a Correspondence Management System. Call it a mail room solution or whatever the latest slang dictates, the problem is the same one I was talking to a large agency about solving in January!

People are asking me to speak on Process and why projects go wrong. Cloud and mobile are dropping as stand-alone topics. They are becoming part of the discussion around how to solve the old problems with addition of these new tools.

Reinforcing the issue are a few fun facts from some recent AIIM research:

  • 45% of scanned documents are created digitally
  • 77% of invoices that arrive as PDF attachments get printed
  • 31% of faxed invoices get printed and scanned again

Depressed yet?

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Debating the Future of Content Management at AIIM 2012

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imageBack before either Cheryl McKinnon or I were considering bringing our skills to AIIM, we submitted a proposal to this year’s AIIM Conference to moderate a panel on the Future of Content Management. For this discussion, we decided to bring representatives from the traditional, open source, and cloud-based Content Management worlds onto the same stage.

As a result, we have the following on the stage:

Pretty exciting group there. I have laid out some rules that we’ll be enforcing in the debate.

  1. No Selling: This is vendor solution approach versus vendor solution approach. Each speaker represents their entire Content Management vendor area, not just their own companies.
  2. Speak Ill of No Vendor: To be honest, if they want to say something negative about themselves, they can. If they want to say something bad about one of the other vendor groupings, that works as long as it is generic.
  3. No Speeches: Hoping for a discussion, not a few rehearsed viewpoints.
  4. No Selling: Or did I mention that already?

To warm things up, I asked them some questions to set the stage for next week. In addition, if you have any questions you’d like to submit to be put to the panel, add them to the comments below. I will be writing a follow-up afterwards to capture the debate.

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The “Better” Information Professional

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Normally I don’t like to post too quickly on a specific topic. This is because I like people to digest the previous post and let it bounce around the net a bit. Today calls for an exception.

As I discussed, I took AIIM’s new Certified Information Professional exam cold. While I did want to judge the exam, there was a second reason for taking it cold. I bet Cheryl McKinnon that I could score higher then her without studying. While I wasn’t overly confident, I figured the odds were even and the conditions of the bet weren’t onerous.

Well, I lost. Cheryl, a vice president of MARKETING, received a higher score. She is the better CIP.

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Certified Information Professional, A Valid Measure

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Yesterday I talked a little about why the concept of a Certified Information Professional is important to making Information Management a real profession and the gap that it is aiming to fill. Today I want to talk about the exam itself and whether or not it is a good measurement tool.

I’m not going to bore you with all the details on how the exam was prepared by outside experts or any of that. While important, that isn’t a true measure. I think the true measure is the opinions of the battle-scarred veterans of the Information wars. Being one, I offer my opinion here to start building a consensus.

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Becoming a Certified Information Professional

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Certifiied Information Professional (CIP) logoToday I went out and passed AIIM’s Certified Information Professional exam. There are a lot of thoughts I want to share around this action, but it is going to take a couple of posts. In this post I am going to cover the Why. Later I will cover the What.

The first thing I want to say is that working for AIIM is not the reason I took the exam. My original goal had been to listen to feedback from others before I took the exam. It was always in my 2012 plans. Joining AIIM just moved me from the laggard position to that of the evaluator.

After all, if I was going to be the lead Information Professional at AIIM I should at least check out the certification sooner rather than later.

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My Next Life as AIIM’s CIO

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Pretty exciting, eh? Definitely a different, yet very, familiar role. When you consider that I’m joining a pretty good team that just added Cheryl McKinnon as VP of Marketing, you can start to see some exciting, or at least interesting, times ahead.

Now that you’ve read the answer to the open-ended question from a week ago, what else is there to tell you? How about the story behind my move to AIIM and a little about what I see happening in my future?

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Folders, A Nutritious Part of Your Content Management Diet

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Sean Hederman of Signate Document Management wrote a rebuttal of  my AIIM article defending folders. He admits a bias as he works for a Document Management vendor built around search. I thought of writing a short response saying that he missed the point of my article and that he had nothing to rebut, but where is the fun in that?

My article was itself a rebuttal against an AIIM article saying we should get rid of folders by Chris Riley. I never meant to imply that we should get rid of search, only that we shouldn’t get rid of folders. I like search, and metadata for that matter. I complain vocally when search doesn’t work well.

With that in mind, here are his points. Each heading is a direct quote of a heading from his post.

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